Two men walked out of a mountain on Friday. One of them was carried out on a rescuer’s shoulder, caked in mud, nine days after the water came. Behind them, Nepali officials believe about 115 more are still inside the same tunnel at Trishuli 3A, and roughly 500 more are underground at other dam sites across the country. Most of this week’s coverage has been about the glacier and the wave. This post is about the men in the tunnels, and a claim the Church has made since 1891 that the construction industry has never fully accepted.
The News Story
Rescuers in Nepal pulled two men alive from a flooded hydropower tunnel on Friday, nine days after a wall of water and debris tore down the Trishuli valley and killed more than 1,250 people.
The two were brought out of the tunnel at the Trishuli 3A construction site in Rasuwa district, north of Kathmandu. Rescue teams first heard voices from inside the tunnel Friday morning, which helped them locate the men, according to Nepalese lawmaker Shri Ram Neupane. Army spokesman Brig. Gen. Raja Ram Basnet confirmed the first rescue, and Neupane posted about the second shortly afterward. Officials identified the two as a mechanical foreman and a mechanical supervisor, and said both were in stable condition and were flown to a hospital in Kathmandu. Basnet said one of the survivors told rescuers that other people were still alive inside.
“I can’t explain what we are feeling at the moment. We are just grateful to god,” Amir Maharjan, brother of one of the rescued men, told The Associated Press.
Arnold Dix, president of the International Tunneling and Underground Space Association, said earlier Friday that teams at the site believed they had heard a faint reply of “hunchha,” Nepali for yes, after calling into the tunnel. Dix, who has advised on tunnel-collapse rescues elsewhere, told Agence France-Presse that crews had cleared 50 to 60 meters of debris and were expecting to break through at any moment. He is traveling to Nepal to join the operation on the ground. The two men came out less than an hour later.
The Independent Power Producers Association of Nepal puts the number of workers missing at Trishuli 3A at 557, with about 115 believed to be inside the main tunnel. Across 12 hydropower projects, local authorities count roughly 900 missing workers, about 500 of them thought to be trapped underground. Communication Minister Bikram Timilsina wrote on Facebook that officials expect more rescues. “We are waiting for the rescue of more and more people,” he wrote.
The flood began on the morning of August 26, when what scientists believe was a rock and ice collapse near Langtang Lirung sent a surge down the Lhende Khola and into the Trishuli River. Seismometers around the world registered a magnitude 5.2 tremor from the collapse. The water destroyed the Gyirong Port crossing on the China-Nepal border and struck settlements along roughly 72 kilometers of river. Some bodies were carried as far as 240 kilometers into India.
Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority reported 1,259 dead and more than 5,000 missing as of Thursday, with 583 foreign nationals among the missing. China said late Wednesday that 21 people had died and 541 were missing on the Tibet side of the border, including 261 foreigners. Anadolu Agency put the combined toll at 1,280 dead and more than 5,620 missing. Nepali authorities say they have rescued 11,814 people, including 324 foreign nationals, and have mobilized more than 21,400 security personnel. Property damage in Nepal was estimated at over $1.3 billion within two days of the flood, before the full extent of the destruction downstream was known.[1]
Catholic Social Teaching Analysis
Start with the human toll, because it should change how we read the story. Nepal’s confirmed dead stand at 1,259. The hydropower projects alone account for about 900 of the country’s missing workers, and roughly 500 of those men are thought to be underground right now. Trishuli 3A by itself is missing 557. Whatever the final count turns out to be, a very large share of the people this flood killed were on a payroll when it happened. They were wage laborers, at work, inside somebody’s construction project.
That fact alone puts this story squarely inside a body of Church teaching that most people have never heard of. The Church speaks to this situation with uncomfortable precision.
What “Priority” Actually Means
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church states the governing principle in five words: “Labor has an intrinsic priority over capital.”[2] It then quotes John Paul II to explain what the claim is: “in this process labor is always a primary efficient cause, while capital, the whole collection of means of production, remains a mere instrument or instrumental cause.”[3]
That’s technical language, and it’s worth slowing down to understand it, because the claim it makes is about causation. Aristotle’s efficient cause is the thing that actually brings something about. The instrumental cause is what the efficient cause uses. For example, a hammer doesn’t build a house. A carpenter builds a house with a hammer. The carpenter is the efficient cause whereas the hammer is the instrumental cause.
Apply that to Trishuli 3A. The dam is capital in the plainest sense of the word: a means of production, built to generate electricity, which generates revenue. The men in the tunnel were the efficient cause of the dam. The dam is the instrument. In the Church’s ordering, the project exists because of them, and it exists for them; in a way, it does not and cannot exist for its own sake.
This has a hard practical edge. On any construction project, some things are treated as fixed and some as flexible. The completion date is usually fixed. The financing is usually fixed. What flexes is whatever is left over, and the schedule pressure lands on the men doing the physical work. When a project treats its capital as the fixed quantity and the safety of its workers as the variable one, it has reversed the order the Church describes. That reversal is the distance between a hammer, which can be replaced, and a foreman, who cannot.
Guard against misreading this text, because it is a mistake that often happens. The same paragraph of the Compendium that asserts labor’s priority also insists on complementarity, and it quotes Leo XIII to make the point stick: “Capital cannot stand without labor, nor labor without capital.”[2] Nepal needs power, and the people who financed Trishuli 3A are doing something the Church regards as legitimate and good. The teaching is narrower and more useful than a general suspicion of enterprise. It tells you what happens when the two interests actually collide, which on a construction site is most days: one of them yields, and the Church has already said which one must yield.
John Paul II drew the conclusion himself, and he wrote it in the plainest sentence in the whole encyclical: “however true it may be that man is destined for work and called to it, in the first place work is ‘for man’ and not man ‘for work’.”[4] The dignity of work, he argued, comes from the person doing it rather than from the kind of work being done. A man welding rebar 60 meters inside a mountain has the same claim to protection as the engineer who designed the intake. The Gospel of work, as he called it, rests on the fact that the Son of God spent most of His earthly life doing manual labor at a bench.
The Right That Was At Stake In The Tunnel
The Compendium turns the principle into an enumerated right. Among the rights of workers it lists is the right “to a working environment and to manufacturing processes which are not harmful to the workers’ physical health or to their moral integrity.” And then, in the same paragraph, it says something that reads differently this week than it did last week: “It often happens that work conditions for men, women and children, especially in developing countries, are so inhumane that they are an offense to their dignity and compromise their health.”[5]
Nobody thinks a contractor caused a glacier to fail. The moral question is narrower and harder than blame for the flood, and Catholic teaching makes it obligatory to ask: what did the men inside that tunnel have by way of warning, and by way of a way out?
The question has teeth because the Trishuli corridor has a history. In July 2025, a glacial lake outburst on this same border river washed away the bridge at the Rasuwagadhi crossing. That was 13 months before August 26. Whether the projects along the Trishuli were designed and staffed with that record in mind is a factual question I can’t settle from Omaha, and the honest thing is to say so rather than pronounce on it. But the families of 557 missing men at one site are owed the answer, and the Church’s teaching says the answer is a matter of justice and not of public relations. A right to a working environment that doesn’t harm your physical health is worth nothing if it only applies to hazards nobody could have anticipated.
Why Nepal Is Digging
There’s a second thing in this story, and it’s the reason the two rescues on Friday matter beyond the two families involved.
Nepal has put more than 21,400 security personnel into this operation. Crews at Trishuli 3A cleared 50 to 60 meters of packed debris, largely to reach a small number of men whose survival, on day nine, most sober people would have written off. Measured strictly as an allocation of scarce resources, that is indefensible. Measured as an expression of what a human being is worth, it’s the only defensible thing available.
The Compendium names the reason directly. In weighing labor against capital, it insists that “the ‘principal resource’ and the ‘decisive factor’ at man’s disposal is man himself.”[6] The Nepal Army digging by hand toward a voice that said “hunchha” is that doctrine being practiced by people who have probably never read a word of it. This is roughly what you’d expect, if the teaching is true.
So here is the part that reaches past Nepal. The electricity these dams produce is a regional export product, sold into grids that serve people who will never see the Trishuli. That is the ordinary shape of infrastructure everywhere: the benefit is broad and visible, and the cost is narrow, concentrated, and out of sight, sixty meters inside a mountain. Catholic social teaching asks you to keep the cost in view anyway. The next time you read that a project is behind schedule or over budget, you now know which line item usually absorbs the pressure, and you know what the Church says about that ordering.
And if you’re Catholic and you sit on a parish finance council, a school board, a diocesan building committee, or any body that reviews a contract, this teaching binds you at the moment you sign. The cheapest bid is cheap for a reason. The reason is almost never that somebody discovered a better way to weld.
Two men came out on Friday. About 115 are still in there.
This story turns on the priority of labor over capital.
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Footnotes
- “2 Trapped Workers Rescued from a Hydropower Tunnel 9 Days after Nepal Floods,” Associated Press, published by WSLS, September 4, 2026, wsls.com; “Two Trapped Workers Rescued from Hydropower Tunnel Nine Days after Nepal Floods,” Euronews, September 4, 2026, euronews.com; “2 Trapped Workers Rescued Alive from a Tunnel in Nepal, Officials Say,” ABC News, September 4, 2026, abcnews.com; “Nepal-China Flash Floods Death Toll Rises to 1,280, over 5,620 Missing as Search, Rescue Enter 2nd Week,” Anadolu Agency, September 4, 2026, aa.com.tr; “Man Rescued, More Voices Heard at Flood-Stricken Nepali Power Plant Where Scores Trapped,” CNN, September 3, 2026, abc17news.com; “Race against Time to Find Workers Missing in Nepal’s Hydropower Tunnels,” CNN, August 31, 2026, cnn.com; “Death Toll from Devastating Floods in Nepal and China Surpasses 1,000,” Al Jazeera, September 1, 2026, aljazeera.com; “Nepal Mudslide Rescue Video Shows Workers Pulling People from Tunnel,” Fox News, September 2026, foxnews.com; “Mass Burials of Unidentified Victims Continue in Nepal as Death Toll Exceeds 1,100 One Week after Flash Floods,” Euronews, September 2, 2026, euronews.com; “Rescued Trishuli 3A Engineer Confirms All Workers Trapped in Tunnel Are Safe,” Nepal News, September 4, 2026, english.nepalnews.com. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 277. ↩
- Pope John Paul II, Laborem Exercens: On Human Work (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1981), no. 12, vatican.va, quoted in Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 277. ↩
- Pope John Paul II, Laborem Exercens: On Human Work (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1981), no. 6, vatican.va. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 301. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 278. ↩
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